Please Stop

The Rock looks like Stretch Armstrong in Moana, a realization it took me around half of the nearly two-hour running time to come to. In reprising his role as Maui, the Polynesian demigod he voiced in the animated version of the film, he wears a tattooed bodysuit that, he informed Extra, took a few hours to put on every day. Dwayne Johnson is a famously big guy, one who has emptied the ocean of cod to fulfill his protein needs and whose workouts could form their own editorial verticals at various men’s magazines. But the animated Maui is as wide as he is tall, and in order to create a body type that at least evokes that build onscreen, Johnson had to turn to prosthetics. The result is, like so many of the choices in these remakes, unsettling, done with what are obviously enormous production resources but beholden to aim for a very literal re-creation that guarantees it’s going to look chintzy (see also the wig perched on his head). No matter how high quality the bodysuit is, it still looks artificial, with the star’s 54-year-old face perched on top of this bulging torso like someone dressed in a very defined version of an inflatable sumo suit — or like a grinning plastic head popped on top of a latex body filled with goo to create a malleable facsimile of a buff bod, as long as you avoid puncturing the skin with a sharp object.

Moana isn’t the worst of the live-action Disney remakes, or the ugliest, but it’s the fastest in terms of the amount of time that has elapsed since the original, which is its own extra-depressing stat. The animated Moana came out ten years ago, recent enough for Johnson to play Maui IRL without it looking too weird (bodysuit aside) while technically allowing for the next generation of child moviegoers to have emerged, but just barely. The most generous interpretation of Disney’s compulsive cannibalizing of its own signature line of releases is that the company is giving grown-ups a chance to share new interpretations of the movies they loved with their own kids. The live-action Moana, directed in his feature debut by theater vet Thomas Kail (of the stage versions of In the Heights and Hamilton), lays bare the actual motivations: to squeeze as much revenue as possible from the existing hits because the powers that be no longer have confidence in their ability to turn out new ones. But could there end up being greater costs to announcing to the increasingly disenchanted, Obsession-loving teens who grew up with the 2016 film that you have no ideas beyond jabbing at nostalgia like a scab you can’t stop picking at?

Quite possibly! Of course, by then most of the executives involved will have moved on or retired with golden parachutes and it won’t matter. Moana is based on a screenplay credited to Dana Ledoux Miller and original writer Jared Bush and follows what has become the playbook for so many of these remakes. It’s not a reinterpretation but a painstakingly careful re-creation down to the staging of the musical numbers. All the songs written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Opetaia Foa’i, and Mark Mancina are still here, including admitted banger “How Far I’ll Go,” along with an obligatory new track that star Catherine Laga’aia performs alongside Johnson and Auli’i Cravalho, the voice of the original Moana. Laga’aia, an Australian teenager making her film debut, is an appealing presence with a brilliant smile and a voice with some endearingly shaky moments, but she’s not exactly getting the chance to act as the Disney princess. She’s trapped in a path as preordained as that of her character, the daughter of the island chieftain, Tui (John Tui), who has been raised to be a leader despite her dreams of taking to the sea and reviving her people’s forgotten art of wayfinding. When a blight hits the island, the result of a curse that began when Maui stole a gem representing the heart of the goddess Te Fiti, Moana gets her quest and excuse to voyage — to find the missing Maui and force him to return the stone.

As the actor who originated the role, Johnson fares a bit better as Maui, smirking and preening and repeatedly tossing Moana off her own boat in attempts to commandeer it for himself. But rendering their dynamic in live action makes it unignorable that this is a story about a grown man spending a lot of alone time with a teenage girl, and Moana quivers with a certain discomfort about that, first unsuccessfully trying to angle them as older brother paired with bratty younger sibling, then as reluctant surrogate father teaching a girl whose dad is already supportive and present. Restaging the action with actors adds little to the story — and most of the time makes things look worse. The movie adds a fanciful animated background to Maui’s first big song, “You’re Welcome,” in order to have more than just Johnson and Laga’aia swanning around a desert island onscreen, but the result looks about as deft as a YouTube kiddie show. The interlude in which Moana and Maui retrieve Maui’s magical fishhook from the giant crab Tamatoa (Jemaine Clement, also returning) just looks murkier and harder to follow, with the grinning manic character of the original design reduced to vague nightmare fuel.

Most of the truly memorable moments in the first Moana, like the scene in which the heroine, at her lowest moment, is visited by her luminescent ancestors emerging from the quiet ocean, or the final confrontation, a gorgeous instance of empathy and grace instead of violence, end up looking like utter dog shit in this version, which is the greatest sin of all. Disney built its kingdom on animation, on pop masterpieces that used hand-drawn and computer-rendered art that resonated so strongly that they’ve continued to maintain a hold on fans, in a way that can verge on the disturbing but is inarguably powerful. To devalue its own output this way feels like pulling the material to its breaking point, testing its tensile strength in hopes that it can hold for another round. And as any Stretch Armstrong owner knows, puncture that exterior and it breaks forever, oozing out its insides to leave you not with a toy but with just corn syrup and rubber.

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